Scsi commands are transported over fibre channel to the controllers on the SAN (now there is iscsi: scsi over tcp/ip). So, what you need is: fc drivers on your host along with fc card. If you use qlogic card, you gotta install qlogic drivers. You buy fc cards or you buy your boxes with fc cards installed: for instance, sun/hp ships their boxes with qlogic and some other cards. So, sun and hp supplies 'free' drivers for them. do you have to purchase this 3rd party software for oracle enterprise linux > ? Its not vendor specific to the SAN. > Depends on who manufactured your fc card, and get that driver.